What in the hell …

One of the two birthday gifts I brought to Uncle Karl’s (Great-Uncle, technically) birthday festivities was a small translation from Sandro Mezzadra’s book. In the translated passage, Mezzadra argues for placing forced labor more at the heart of our understanding of capitalism, and making “free” labor (waged labor) less central. (This reminds me, I want to blog about Amy Dru Stanley and John Fabian Witt on free labor.)

Walter Johnson makes similar remarks in his introduction to the anthology The Chattel Principle. (Someplace I have a copy of Johnson’s essay “The Pedestal and the Veil,” about slavery, cotton, and linen in relation Marx’s account of capitalism and to primitive accumulation in particular. I need to find that and type up those notes. Note to self, see also these other notes on primitive accumulation and forced labor.)

Johnson writes that Marx “treated slavery as a sort of historical backdrop to (…) the main tendency of history,” namely “the development of wage (or “free”) labor relations.” This is “a story of temporal succession” which is “part of a larger history of expropriative “primitive accumulation” by means of which the capitalist class made proletarians out of peasants and gained control of the means of production - the backstory to the history of capitalism proper.”

Johnson calls of “[t]urning the question around” in order to ask not what can Marx tell us about slavery but what can slavery tell us about Marx. For Johnson, doing so “reveals that the institution of slavery in general and the histories and perspectives of enslaved people in particular remain unthought in the foundational texts of Western political economy. In them the peculiar plight of people of African descent in the market economies of the West exists in a state of erasure, acknowledged only to be superseded by capitalism (here understood to be uniquely characterized by waged labor and, generally, though not exclusively or explicitly, European-descended workers).” Johnson asks, “[w]hat would have happened if Karl Marx had begun his magnificent critique of the commodity form with a detailed consideration not of a bolt of finished linen but a bale of cotton? What would a theory of political economy that treated the labor, products, and experiences of people of African descent as central to (rather than prior to) the history of Western capitalism look like?” Johnson asserts that if our understanding of what the word “capitalism” means doesn’t include or illuminate the history of slavery, “then in some way the descriptive power of that term as a tool of historical analysis has been diminished.” (8.)

(Note to self, add notes on Johnson’s book, the stuff on price and so on, or do another blog post on that stuff.)